Trump's border wall looks more like a fence

Tigar

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Do ya think he realizes that there’s a penis behind him looking like he’s thinking 🤔 “Yeah, 3 more months and I’ve got your job”
 

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Uh yes, I see it...

 
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Chin Rey

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Some quick calculations just for fun. Judging by the scale of the car, these steel bars are 8 m tall above the ground, 0.25 m in diameter and spaced 0.25 m apart. Assuming they are anchored 2 m into the ground and made from solid steel, they would require about 40 million metric tonnes of steel - almost half USA's total steel production in 2014 - to cover the entire US-Mexican border with this design. Assuming a price of 335 USD per tonne (the current U.S price for shredded scrap steel), the cost of the raw materials alone would be more than 13.5 billion dollars.

That's for the bars alone, not including the necessary bracing and such.

Of course, they could be made from hollow steel tubes but this design is critically flimsy even when solid so that's not really an option. All it takes to break through it is a truck, a length of heavy steel chain and about half an hour of time before the border patrol arrives. An actual wall that would have any significant effect at all, would require far sturdier bars using far more steel.

On top of that, steel rusts, so maintenance would be a nightmare.

Please feel free to repost and redistribute this post any way you like as long as it is the entire post (excluding the illustration from Twitter) with the reservation that this is a very quick estimate and should be checked and rechecked for errors by experts.
 
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Some quick calculations just for fun. Judging by the scale of the car, these steel bars are 8 m tall above the ground, 0.25 m in diameter and spaced 0.25 m apart. Assuming they are anchored 2 m into the ground and made from solid steel, they would require about 40 million metric tonnes of steel - almost half USA's total steel production in 2014 - to cover the entire US-Mexican border with this design. Assuming a price of 335 USD per tonne (the current U.S price for shredded scrap steel), the cost of the raw materials alone would be more than 13.5 billion dollars.

That's for the bars alone, not including the necessary bracing and such.

Of course, they could be made from hollow steel tubes but this design is critically flimsy even when solid so that's not really an option. All it takes to break through it is a truck, a length of heavy steel chain and about half an hour of time before the border patrol arrives. An actual wall that would have any significant effect at all, would require far sturdier bars using far more steel.

On top of that, steel rusts, so maintenance would be a nightmare.

Please feel free to repost and redistribute this post any way you like as long as it is the entire post (excluding the illustration from Twitter) with the reservation that this is a very quick estimate and should be checked and rechecked for errors by experts.
Rust? It won't have time to rust. It'll be in some scrap metal dealers yard within a week.
 

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Some quick calculations just for fun. Judging by the scale of the car, these steel bars are 8 m tall above the ground, 0.25 m in diameter and spaced 0.25 m apart. Assuming they are anchored 2 m into the ground and made from solid steel, they would require about 40 million metric tonnes of steel - almost half USA's total steel production in 2014 - to cover the entire US-Mexican border with this design. Assuming a price of 335 USD per tonne (the current U.S price for shredded scrap steel), the cost of the raw materials alone would be more than 13.5 billion dollars.
Did some quick googling with those figures and came up with some interesting comparisons. 40 million metric tons equals approximately 44 million US tons. A US Navy Nimitz class aircraft carrier weighs approximately 97,000 US tons. The proposed border fence would use as much steel as it would take to build approximately 453 such aircraft carriers! I'm thinking even a $13.5B price tag may be a severe under-estimate, and that's just for the raw material. Manufacturing all of those slats and supporting structures is going to jack the price up even further. And then there's the time it will take to construct all of those slats and structure elements. I doubt Donnie Boy will live long enough to even see his border fence be fully constructed.
 

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Rust? It won't have time to rust. It'll be in some scrap metal dealers yard within a week.
I can see a great future for the Mexican scrap metal business.

The people who take down the border fence probably won't even have time to charge "entrance fees" from the people who pass through. They'll be way to busy cutting up poles for scrap.


Either way, removal of one fence post should be enough for people to get through.
Indeed. My estimate is that one missing pole/tube/beam will allow about 100 people a minute through. Does that sound right?

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Now, this is my personal opinion of course but I do actually feel there is something wrong when the prsident of a nation throws a tantrum when the congress refuses to give him 70 billion dollars for a plan so ridiculous it only takes a bit of basic high school math to debunk it.
 

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